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Agenda 2030: The Sustainable Development Goals

Agenda 2030, agreed in 2015 at the UN General Assembly, has anchored a set of 17 goals and associated 169 targets that will act as the successors to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The Agenda sets out to ensure prosperity and well-being for people within planetary boundaries and in the face of a changing climate. Agenda 2030 marks a refined approach to international development, where all countries take collective responsibility through the principle of universality. This is coupled with pursuing differentiated, yet ambitious actions by all countries to enhance the objectives and targets set out in the SDGs. This means more action needs to happen at home in the EU, as well as overseas through its international cooperation with developing countries and Middle Income Countries. The EU’s action to integrate sustainable development objectives into its domestic and international policies will serve as an important method to enhance climate action whilst tackling poverty and inequality. Thorough implementation of the SDGs should represent the integration of key environmental, development and climate concerns across many of the EU’s policy areas, for example, trade, energy, agriculture, and finance.

Latest Publications

The report reveals that none of the EU countries provide a comprehensive overview of their fossil fuel subsidies nor a concrete plan to phase them out in their draft NECPs, despite having committed to end fossil fuel subsidies ten years ago through the G20.

This study pulls together the many pieces of the enormous puzzle often referred to as externalities of coal exploitation, yet another term blurring our appreciation of the entire toll we all pay for continued reliance on coal - in Mugla and elsewhere.

Coordinated by SDG Watch Europe and launched at the UN High Level Political Forum on the SDGs in July 2019, this report shadows the EU's own assessment of its progress on Agenda 2030 by looking at the negative externalities and spill-over effects of EU policies in developing countries.